SUBSCRIBE TO OUR FREE NEWSLETTER
Daily news & progressive opinion—funded by the people, not the corporations—delivered straight to your inbox.
5
#000000
#FFFFFF
5
#000000
#FFFFFF
mental health
Trump Isn't Mentally Ill; He's Evil
Repeating time and time again that Donald Trump is crazy not only negatively affects the mentally ill but also seriously misunderstands the man and his policies.
May 14, 2026
Dear public figures, media folks, and journalists, please do not suggest that President Donald Trump is crazy. It is not helpful and, in fact, it is hurtful... not to him but the rest of us.
There are two main reasons for this request. First, calling Trump crazy is harmful to people who have a mental health condition or who have loved ones with a mental illness; second, it is inaccurate and leads to a serious misunderstanding of the man, his behavior, and it’s origins and consequences.
Unfortunately, there are a lot of unfair, hurtful, and false seterotypes of the mentally ill that are propagated and repeated over and over again in our society. For instance, media figures and journalists often describe perpetrators of violence as mentally ill. Generally speaking, this is not true. Study after study points out the the mentally ill, in fact, are not violent. Indeed, they are more likely to be the victims of violence than perpetrators of it. Most people with mental health diagnoses are law-abiding contributing members of society. Epidemiological research indicates that 97% of those with mental illness do not commit violent acts.
Nor are the mentally ill immoral. It is somewhat commonplace to find public figures, journalists, and other “experts” express that a person who commits a horribly immoral act must be mentally ill. This is a faulty presumption. Mental illness does not necessarily affect moral reasoning or understanding. It is pretty common to hear or read that those whose behaviors are irrational, unpredictable, or erratic must have a mental health condition. This, also, is a harmful and erroneous stereotype. After all, irrational thinking is pretty common. We are all irrational some of the time and in some situations. and also rational and predictable in others. Irrational thoughts are completely normal. Researchers sometimes point out that some kinds of mental illness may include a deficit in common sense or deviations from social norms but not a deficit in logical thought or “reason.”
Finally, the dictionary defines evil as actions and ideas characterized by impending future misfortune. There has never been a president of the United States more ominous than Donald Trump.
Another common misconception about those with mental illnesses is that they are dysfunctional and unable to live as honest and contributing members of their communities. This, too, is not true. The majority of those with a mental illness are simply ordinary folks. In any given year 20% or more of the population has a mental health diagnosis. Therefore, at any given time, there are millions of people with a mental health condition making positive contributions to their communities.
So, why do so many of us hold these false and damaging steretypes about those with a mental health condition? Perhaps the most common communicator of these misconceptions are the media of mass communication, both fictional (television, movies, internet sites, etc) and nonfiction (talk shows, news media, politicians, etc).
This brings me to Donald Trump. Repeating time and time again that Donald Trump is crazy not only negatively affects the mentally ill but also seriously misunderstands the man and his policies.
Donald Trump is not crazy, he is evil. The America Heritage Dictionary definition of evil has three components. The first one is that evil means morally bad or wrong. The list of the immoral acts of our president is too long to be included listed completely here, but consider just a sampling: participating in Jeffrey Epstein’s abuses, illegally detaining and deporting veterans, children, and others; using charitable donations for personal desires; separating innocent children from their families; fomenting racism and racial hatred; ridiculing the disabled; daily misogyny; supporting white supremacy; inciting violence; lying for personal gain; harming the lives of LGBTQ+ people; taking food and medical care from children and their families; and the list goes on and on.
The dictionary also defines evil as harmful or causing injury and pain. Rather than repeating the cruel and hateful list above, please consider this sampling of the harmful consequences of decisions of President Trump: ordering the murder of hundreds of people who have been in boats attacked because they were supposedly carrying illegal drugs; murdering nearly a hundred people in Venezuela when the country was attacked and he ordered its president arrested; causing death and injury to tens of thousands of Iranians during his war against the government of that country; partnering with Israel's raining of death and destruction on the people of Lebanon, Gaza, and Palestine; expanding the embargo against Cuba causing pain, injury, and death to ordinary Cubans; and his administration’s defunding of the medical aid and food assistance provided to less developed nations by the US Agency for International Development, which has damaged the lives of millions of people around the world.
And, of course, actions of this president also have caused harmful and deadly damages within the United States. Consider: the terrible harms, injuries, and deaths caused by his orders to Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), resulting in the detention of over 50,000 adults and children in dangerous and deadly detention centers; he also has deported millions of individuals, some to dangerous countries or to the very life-threatening situations they fled. In addition, he has empowered his ICE agents to injure and even murder US citizens who were exercising their political and personal rights; Trump’s defunding of federal programs in the areas of healthcare and the environment has stripped men, women, and children of their access to food and medical care, causing pain, injury, and death to many people; and his administration’s reductions of environmental protections and general disregard of climate change threatens the health of all living beings,
Finally, the dictionary defines evil as actions and ideas characterized by impending future misfortune. There has never been a president of the United States more ominous than Donald Trump. Nearly every day he posts messages that threaten his critics and opponents. He says he will use the power of the government to bring them down. He tells his supporters, “I am your retribution.” Time and time again, he threatens to destroy Iran, razing it to the ground and killing millions of Iranians. He announces planes to annex Greenland, Canada, and Venezuela. He hints that he is going to use force to change the political-economic system in Cuba. He says he will prosecute his political opponents for treason and has threatened to shoot those protesting in the streets. And, of course, he regularly declares that he will imprison immigrants and deport them to dangerous places. In just one year he has threatened to punish, invade, or take control of Canada, Cuba, Mexico, Nicaragua, Panama, Venezuela, Colombia, Nigeria, and Iran.
So, dear news anchors and pundits, please stop suggesting that President Donald Trump is mentally ill. Doing so defames and insults those of us who have a mental illness and misunderstands the problem that is Donald Trump. He is not “crazy.” He is prejudiced, cruel, violent, hateful, uninformed, dangerous, and immoral. Our president is not mentally ill. Our president is evil.
Keep ReadingShow Less
The Lesson From the LA Teachers' Win: There Is Money to Pay Educators If We Demand It
For too long, the narrative has been that we cannot afford to support teachers. We’ve just shown we cannot afford not to.
Apr 25, 2026
Before stepping into the classroom, I spent 12 years as an investigator with the California State Bar, examining cases of attorney misconduct. I chose to teach because I saw a meaningful way to serve my community, and I understood there would be sacrifice. Still, it took 10 years before my salary caught up to what I earned in my final year as an investigator.
In California, becoming an educator is neither easy nor inexpensive. In fact, it is one of the most challenging states to obtain a teaching license. Despite this, teachers remain among the most underpaid professionals relative to their level of education. According to the US Census Bureau, teacher earnings have not only lagged behind comparable fields, but have experienced a steady annual decline.
The debate is not whether schools have enough money, it is about what we choose to spend it on. Today, many educators cannot afford to live where they teach. Teaching, while never lucrative, used to offer a stable path to a middle class life. Educators could buy a home, live in the communities where they worked, and maintain the financial stability expected of other professions with similar levels of education. Sadly, even the most modest of those expectations are rapidly disappearing. I only own a home because I purchased it prior to switching my career.
Most educators did not choose this career for the money, but there is a clear difference between modest compensation and exploitation. Nearly 1 in 5 teachers in Los Angeles are housing insecure. And nearly 60% of educators across the country take on second jobs outside of teaching to make ends meet. It is unacceptable that the people responsible for educating our children are struggling to hold their head above water.
These victories for Los Angeles educators are not perks. They are the foundation of a functioning school system, and a respected career.
Teachers are also expected to subsidize their classrooms out of their own pockets. These stories are often framed as heartwarming and altruistic, but they reflect systemic failure and a lack of meaningful investment in public education. Few other professions require employees to pay out of pocket while already being underpaid.
The consequences of this underinvestment are becoming impossible to ignore. As the cost of living rises, fewer educators can afford to remain in the classroom. A teacher shortage has already hit Southern California, and the impact is profound. Nationally, teaching shortages have led to larger class sizes, burnout, and financial strain on the education system.
Education is expected to operate in scarcity while other sectors experience enormous growth. The education technology market alone is projected to grow by $170.8 billion by 2029. In the Los Angeles Unified School District alone, more than $1.6 billion has been spent on edtech. Framing this as a funding problem misses the point; it is a question of priorities. We are told we can’t make investments in educators, while billions continue to flow toward technology and outside contracts instead of the classrooms they are meant to serve.
And yet, during recent labor negotiations in Los Angeles, we were told a familiar refrain: There is no money.
This was the backdrop of three educational unions, representing more than 70,000 workers, on the brink of striking across Los Angeles. At the center of the dispute for United Teachers Los Angeles was a straightforward demand: a salary structure that reflects economic reality. As negotiations stretched over 14 months, frustration grew not only among educators but across school communities, culminating in escalating public pressure, organizing efforts at school sites, and an overwhelming strike authorization vote that made clear teachers were prepared to act if necessary.
Only when the possibility of a strike became real did the district return to the table with urgency. We ultimately won the majority of our demands, including overhauling the outdated pay system that kept incoming educators at artificially low salaries, raising the starting salary from $68,966 to $77,000 for teachers, and securing an average salary increase of 13.86% across the board. This is evidence that the “no money” claim is negotiable, not factual.
Just as significantly, for the first time in California, educators in Los Angeles have secured four weeks of paid parental leave. This is a historic breakthrough that now sets a precedent for teachers across the state of California, as well as the entire country. Additionally, we won a major expansion of student support, including more than 450 additional social workers, to address the growing mental health crisis among our youth.
These victories for Los Angeles educators are not perks. They are the foundation of a functioning school system, and a respected career.
When teachers are paid a living wage, they stay. When they can afford to live in the communities they serve, schools are more stable. And when students have access to trained mental health professionals, they are better able to learn. Investment is what makes public schools strong. Without it, everything else collapses.
For too long, the narrative has been that we cannot afford to support teachers. We’ve just shown we cannot afford not to. The lesson from Los Angeles is simple: School funding is not fixed by scarcity, but by priorities. And when educators and school workers organize, those priorities can change—for the better.
Keep ReadingShow Less
US Racism Waged a Multigenerational Assault on the Mental Well-Being of Black People
I lived in American segregation for nearly 25 years. I experienced the daily reminders that dominant white society and American laws deemed Black people less than equal. I saw the mental and psychological effects on my community—all the damaged souls.
Apr 16, 2026
I was born in the American South in 1942 “in the land of the free and the home of the brave” (as the final stanza of the national anthem puts it). Francis Scott Key wrote those words in 1814. However, they were not true then, or in 1942, or today in Donald Trump’s all too reactionary America. My Blackness consigned obstacles to me (as it would have in 1814 and 1942) that white people simply don’t have.
Let me explain.
Life Under Racism
Throughout the 1950s, living in a segregated project in Kinston, North Carolina, there were several odd characters who (I now understand) were mentally ill. One was Snap—or that was what we called him anyway—a man of medium height and brown complexion with a fuzzy beard. Rain or shine, he walked around in the same grey overcoat, spring, summer, and winter, too. Frequently, he sat in a chair under the shade of an oak tree with his eyes closed while smoking a corncob pipe. I never heard him utter a single word, not one, so I didn’t even know if he could speak.
As a kid, I thought he might have been named Snap because his brain had been fractured or broken somehow. When we neighborhood kids were involved in games, he would walk right through the middle of them (as if we didn’t exist). If we were playing football and one of us was running out for a pass, Snap would walk between the ball in the air and the receiver, seemingly oblivious to the world around him. So, we would just continue to play as if he didn’t exist.
Racism is insidious. It contorts the mind and everything it touches.
I once asked my mother what was wrong with Snap and she responded with a degree of certainty: “He’s not right in the head because a bullet was lodged in his brain.” But she explained nothing more. So that left me wondering how he could walk around with a bullet in his head.
I never learned what actually happened to him (though I hate to imagine it today). He was taken care of by relatives who lived a few doors away from us in the project. We children weren’t afraid of him, though he was different from any other adult we knew. Instead, I remember feeling sadness whenever I saw him. He seemed so lonely, being unable to communicate with anyone.
Another character in our community was Preacher. He pushed a wooden cart all over town, making noises with his mouth like a motor car in motion. In the cart were pots, pans, and old clothes. I heard that he had been a Jackleg Preacher, which in my community meant that he had been untrained as a minister, but that he had been spoken to by God and told to preach and carry his message. As with Snap, I never heard Preacher say a word, but I recognized that he was crazy and so got out of his way.
The project where we lived was a community in which the “different” and “damaged” existed next to the normal. In better-off communities across the country, both Snap and Preacher would have been sent to mental institutions, but not in our segregated community. I often wonder if they were living examples of what can happen to Black people when racism joins with other forces, including poverty, personal trauma, and abuse, to break the mind. I later came to wonder whether the trauma of racism was in part responsible for their inability to function in a normal way.
The Psychological Effects of Racism
Racism is insidious. It contorts the mind and everything it touches. In his classic book Black Skin, White Masks, Black psychiatrist Frantz Fanon developed accounts of the psychological effects of racism based, in part, on his own experiences in the French Caribbean. Some of the psychological conditions in the Black community can certainly be attributed to present-day racism, as well as to the multigenerational trauma inflicted on the descendants of American slavery. (Researchers at the Mailman School of Public Health at Columbia University are now examining the links between racism and mental illness, including schizophrenia and psychosis.)
Mental illness certainly found its way into my family. My sister Sherrill held a special place among us because she was the youngest of us and a girl. She was a very good student and a pious Catholic attending the Our Lady of the Atonement Catholic school in her early years. Intelligent and attractive, with the distinctively large eyes of my mother’s family, during her teenage years, she became politically engaged, actively participating in sit-ins, as well as civil rights demonstrations led by our brother Simeon. We had many conversations in our family about civil rights in this country, as well as about how African nations had overcome colonialism by declaring independence and about what all of that meant for our own futures. During that period, Sherrill was active in every aspect of our family life, had good friends, and (although she was moody and could be unusually withdrawn at times) didn’t appear to have the sort of psychological issues that would destroy her promising future.
In 1960, the nuns (all of whom were white) at her Catholic school suggested Sherrill would be a good candidate for the Order’s high school, Saint Joseph’s Academy, in Pennsylvania. The Order of the Most Precious Blood had been founded in Switzerland in 1834 as an active apostolic congregation devoted to Eucharistic prayer and ministry. The Order believed in positive change in the world, was strongly against injustice, and emphasized the value of education, enhancing its appeal to my family.
Isolation in the White World
Nonetheless, in those years, Saint Joseph’s Academy, a boarding school, was a typically white institution with only three or four Black women students attending. Until then, in the still largely segregated South, Sherrill had never been to a school with white students, nor lived among white people. She had been educated in a segregated Catholic elementary school in Kinston. In the new environment, I suspect, my sister was afraid, since she had to deal daily with verbal abuse by white nuns and students who all too often communicated hostile messages toward Blacks. Nor did the school provide any counseling services to help Black students deal with such a grim ongoing reality.
The Doll Test
Religion was at the center of life at St. Joseph’s, but that didn’t prevent Sherrill from experiencing racist aggressions. Many years later, Sarah, a friend of Sherill’s who attended the academy two years before my sister, told me of the hurt she felt when she was excluded from a social gathering at the home of another student because only whites were invited. The racist views of so many of the students, as well as the nuns themselves, were deeply rooted in their psyches, as was then (and remains) true for so much of white America. Did the nuns feel that Black girls weren’t as smart as white girls? Nor as attractive? Nor as spiritual? Undoubtedly. As we know from the famous study of Drs. Kenneth and Mamie Clark in what is called “the Doll Test,” the effects of segregation were devastating. The study was cited in the Supreme Court’s famous Brown v. Board of Education decision. The history of racism from the 1960s to the present moment suggests just what my sister must have experienced.
I believe she must have felt conflicted about leaving home and going to a school in a white community far away. In her frequent letters home, which I only recently reread, she expressed a great deal of loneliness. But she never said she wanted to leave the academy, holding onto her belief in the advantages such an education would provide. Many in the Black Catholic community in Kinston also believed the education provided to the young women at Saint Joseph’s was superior to that of the local segregated public school (and the Catholic school in Kinston did not go beyond eighth grade).
I knew at least five girls from Kinston who had preceded Sherrill to the Academy and for the most part believed the education was better. But today, looking back, I’ve reached a different conclusion. Education at the Academy for a Black young woman must be seen in the context of racism.
But Sherrill’s experiences as a Black girl in an almost completely white institution were not over with that school. She graduated from the academy in four years and matriculated at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro (then, the women’s college of the University of North Carolina, which had only recently been integrated by a few Black students). Thus, my sister’s education after eighth grade was in white institutions that inevitably were at best deeply insensitive and at worst openly hostile to the needs of Black students.
Black Community Support
My brothers and I had a different experience. We all remained in Kinston, attending the segregated Adkin high school. After that, we went to North Carolina College, as the historically Black College in Durham was then called. (Now, it’s North Carolina Central University.) My extended family, friends, and teachers at such Black institutions provided me with the emotional and intellectual grounding I needed to navigate the Jim Crow segregationist world.
But my sister’s experiences—being Black and very alone—must have been a terrible shock for her, since she began exhibiting symptoms of mental illness while attending college. According to my mother, she started to hear voices, as well as imagine unreal events and presences. I now see clearly that racism, among other forces and factors, had a profound effect on her mental health and that it was a mistake for her to live in purely white environments at a critical time in her life, far from her family and the support of the Black community.
Worse yet, there was no help to be had then at St. Joseph’s or at the University of North Carolina. I wonder now whether she even realized what was happening to her. Her condition made it difficult at times for her to pay attention or make plans, although she still graduated with excellent grades. Did she believe that her psychological situation was due to her own weakness? Was she afraid? Ashamed? Did she see any connection between her increasing problems and the racism that affected all our lives? I suspect that she did as she aged and her condition worsened.
I know that, even today, the legacies remain, that hate is broad, and that Donald Trump and his objectively racist ideology have unearthed and seek to continue the worst of American policies.
There was another deep belief in our family, reflected in much of the Black community—that you must be stoic to overcome such grim external circumstances. The value of such stoicism and the adaptive capacity for resilience and resistance that goes with it has been deeply ingrained in the Black experience. Given slavery and then Jim Crow segregation, it was nothing less than an intuitive strategy for survival.
I don’t remember our mother’s response when Sherrill told her she was hearing voices, but I suspect she initially thought Sherrill was exaggerating, since she was doing well in college and that boded well for her future. At the time, our mother was still sensitive about having dropped out of high school at 16 to give birth to my brother Ricky, so she might have been reluctant to ask questions. I suspect she told Sherrill that it would all pass, that she would get through it—and Sherrill must have trusted those words because our mother had herself frequently exhibited an ability to rebound from severe pain and chronic discomfort.
And indeed, Sherrill persisted, graduated, and became a case worker for New York City’s Department of Welfare, working there for several years, maintaining social and family relationships, and even traveling to Europe with a friend. During that time, she must have also endured the pain of mental illness without complaint.
The break came in 1973. When Sherrill was 27 years old, our father, then only 51, died of a heart attack. Sherrill had been especially close to him and his death brought on full-blown psychotic symptoms. Shortly thereafter, she was diagnosed with schizophrenia but refused to take medication for that dreaded disease. Over time, she became unable to deal with daily life, was evicted from her apartment and, homeless, began living in shelters or on the streets of New York City.
We searched for her, but with no luck. Then, one day, while walking in Central Park, I suddenly saw her sitting under a large spruce tree with a small suitcase, eating a sandwich. She was wearing a sundress and brown sandals and had inserted wildflowers in her hair. She appeared strangely calm and content as I approached her and carefully inquired how was she managing, asking where lived. At first, she looked away as if she didn’t even recognize me. Then, she slowly turned in a regal fashion and said, “I live here.”
I responded, “You can’t live in Central Park,” and I tried to warn her about the dangers of doing so. She insisted, “Yes I can—others do it.” I attempted to encourage her to take medication, but she simply smiled and looked away. The more I tried to get her to come with me, the more agitated and resistant she became. Finally, hoping against hope that she would remain where I had left her, I walked the few blocks to my mother’s apartment to tell her where Sherrill was and what had happened, but when my mother and I returned, she was gone.
After that, we kept trying to find her and each time we were successful, Mama would tell my sister that she could live with her if she agreed to take medication for schizophrenia. But Sherrill refused, always walking away from us angrily, insisting that she was fine and that we were the ignorant ones, that she was “high born and high class” and we were “common nigras.”
How sad that was. After all her lack of intimacy with and connection to white people and all the support she had received from Blacks, Sherrill came to believe that Prince Charles of England was coming to save her, that he would be her knight in shining armor.
Interventions
Over a six-year period, family members and friends tried to intervene a number of times and we finally did convince Sherrill to live with our brother, Simeon, in San Francisco. He thought he would be able to get through to her, but after six months he couldn’t deal with her mental state anymore.
Then, Sherrill went to live with the nuns at Saint Joseph’s Academy in Pennsylvania at the invitation of Sister Barbara, a Black woman who grew up in Kinston, who was like family and the only Black nun at the Academy. But after a few months living there, Sherrill grew so difficult that the nuns couldn’t cope and she became homeless again.
Finally, after a few years of various attempts to house her with relatives or in shelters, my mother and Sister Barbara went to court in Pennsylvania, convincing a Judge that Sherrill was a “danger to herself and others.” I joined them near a medical facility where she was being held and, while there, she finally and reluctantly accepted medication for her psychosis. After the medication took effect, we were all shocked by how cogent Sherrill became and how willing—finally!—to accept our help. She was cared for by our mother in her home for the next 40 years of her life.
During many of those years, I took her to regular medical appointments, including visits to a psychiatrist. Once I was present while the psychiatrist spoke with her about her medications. Sherrill was largely unresponsive, answering in single words. I had sympathy for the psychiatrist because Sherrill was often unresponsive even to me. Clearly, she didn’t wish to engage in discussions regarding her illness and, as she grew older, she became more remote from family and friends, as well as from her doctors. Episodes of psychotic delusions were often followed by periods of seeming calm when she could appear to be nearly normal, even if she was shy and began to retreat from family gatherings.
However, on that occasion, the psychiatrist’s question to Sherrill evoked deep emotion in her and my sister’s response reopened in me a profound love and affection for her. The psychiatrist asked her: “How do you feel—it must be difficult to live with this difficult illness?” Sherrill looked glassy-eyed, said nothing for a moment, and then started to sob and continued to do so for a full five minutes. Her weeping revealed the depth of her despair, the loss and tragedy of her life. I cried with her, for her pain, for the loss of all she could have become, and the closeness to me and to our family that schizophrenia prevented.
For her remaining years, Sherrill retreated from much of life, cared for by my mother, brother, and me. Her last three years, which included the Covid-19 pandemic and another psychotic episode, were spent in a nursing home. She died on April 1, 2020, at 75, on the very day on which she had been born, in the nursing home at the height of the Covid-19 pandemic, when no one could even visit her body. Hers was a sad and tragic life.
Aftermath
I can’t be sure why my sister became mentally ill, but I do know that she didn’t receive the help of mental professionals in the early moments when she needed it. The reason? It wasn’t available to her because she was Black, without the necessary resources, and came to adulthood in high school and college in communities that did not understand the needs of a young Black woman. In its most profound sense, racism blinded those who were supposed to be her caretakers.
Thirteen generations of Black people were born into slavery in America. Four generations lived through American Jim Crow. These were systems built on the supposed inferiority of Black people. The legacy is a long one. I lived in American segregation—a virulent, racist Apartheid system—for nearly 25 years. I experienced the daily reminders that dominant white society and American laws deemed Black people less than equal. I saw the mental and psychological effects on my community—all the damaged souls. I know that, even today, the legacies remain, that hate is broad, and that Donald Trump and his objectively racist ideology have unearthed and seek to continue the worst of American policies. And all of that represented and still represents a severe, multigenerational assault on the psychological well-being of Black people. We all have had to face these assaults; some overcame them, some, like my sister, succumbed, but at the deepest level none of us could ignore them, not for a moment.
Keep ReadingShow Less
Most Popular